Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 20th March 2008
Top overseas agent reveals online secrets
Jake Holloway is in it for the money. Whilst running his own web design company, he watched his clients make fortunes from the technology he developed. When venture capital-backed
Overseas Property Centres (OPC) offered him a stake in their new business and the chance to join a high-profile team that includes television presenter
Scott Huggins, he grabbed it with both hands.
Since launching 18 months ago, Jake and his employers have not looked back. Their original business plan to roll out a series of education centres or property showrooms had to be put on hold as the business struggled with the number of online leads they were generating. Jake talks exclusively to Globaledge.co.uk about the secrets of their success.
Leads: it’s all about quality
For a physics graduate, Jake has a remarkable knack of talking in plain English. Although his role is quite technical, he is focused on the commercial side of the business. “Traffic is not important – the only thing that matters is enquiries, and ultimately sales,” he states. All leads that come through to the sales team are scored and recorded on their CRM system, and underperforming lead sources are tweaked or cut if they don’t convert to sale.
He has just suspended their account with Lead Galaxy for
this very reason.
All the traffic that arrives on the OPC site is analysed, particularly for patterns of keywords that convert to lead better than others. He claims to have identified four keyword groups that convert at over ten times the average rate, which means he can target his search efforts much more profitably. I offer a few suggestions in the hope he’ll tell me more but not surprisingly, he refuses to comment.
Facts and figures
So what will he tell us? Well, they are well on track to break even on their original investment midway through 2008 and he is very confident of meeting their target of 20 sales per month, despite the difficult market conditions. He won’t reveal traffic or lead figures but says that the business requires 40 to 50 leads to make a sale and he’s working hard to improve this ratio.
So where do all the leads come from? It’s no surprise when he says that nearly all the leads come through the website or from online channels. The marketing mix has changed over time but currently 50% of leads come from search, 30% from portals and the other 20% from direct traffic and referrals.
You can’t go wrong with property portals
Although the majority of OPC leads come from natural search, he thinks this is unusual, as many agents find it difficult to get their SEO right. “Portals are dominating the SERPs (search engine results pages) more than ever and agents who don’t list on them are missing out on potential leads,” he says adding that “it’s hard to go bust paying £10 a lead [to property portals]”. OPC list with pay-per-performance portals
The Move Channel and
HomesGoFast, although he also advertises on a number of pay-per-month portals, including
Rightmove and
FindaProperty. OPC have just added a number of portals in recent weeks and have promised to share their insights with us next month. Watch this space.
“Nine out of ten agents need to start again on their websites”
OPC have achieved their search engine success by building a site that ranks for thousands of phrases on what is known as the tail (longer phrases like “2 bed property for sale in Tampa Bay”, that don’t individually get much traffic but on aggregate add up to significant volumes).
He says that agents need a website system that creates lots of pages using their property database. Unless you have a very advanced content management system, the way this is done is defined in the design phase of a website and is very difficult to change once built.
“You can’t add SEO after building a website. To improve, nine out of ten agents probably need to start again from scratch or just accept they can’t compete and feed to property portals,” he says.
Content is king
Although, most of OPC traffic comes from automatically generated pages, they mix in knowledge-based articles that both help their rankings and position them as an authority, which helps lead generation. Much of their traffic comes from 6,000 automatically generated pages that look like
this. They have over 1,000 articles on the site and are adding around 30 a week. With three full time technical and content staff, their web team is as big as their sales team. Is this the future for overseas estate agents? Let us know your thoughts by posting a comment below.
Adding value
Part of what attracted Jake to OPC was the company’s commitment to educating clients and providing value added services. “The traditional relationship between enquires, viewing trips and sales is breaking down,” he says," which means agents need to add more value to justify their commissions."
Most agents do this by providing good advice and financial packages for customers. OPC go one step further and provide a wealth of advice online for free. It’s a model that appears to be working.